Once you get past the gimmicks, there’s a common thread among the TVs announced at CES 2023. Every manufacturer is trying to produce the brightest possible sets. For Samsung and LG, that has meant doubling down on their respective OLED display technologies. Hisense is instead seeing how far it can go with Mini LED. At CES 2023, the company unveiled the UX, an 85-inch 4K TV Hisense claims can produce 2,500 nits of peak brightness.
The set is the first entry in the company’s new ULED X line and features Hisense’s in-house Hi-View Engine X processor. According to the company, the chip is the key to what makes the UX special. With control over more than 20,000 Mini LEDs, 5,000 local dimming zones and the industry’s first-ever 16-bit light control algorithm, the Hi-View Engine X allows the UX to produce smoother and more precise dimming and color effects. Hisense claims the UX can achieve three times the “environmental contrast” of an OLED TV, and two times the dynamic range. I’ll note here Hisense didn’t say what OLED TV it used as a benchmark. For a more definitive comparison, the company says the UX features a 150,000 to 1 contrast ratio.
Hisense promises the UX is no slouch in the audio department either. The TV incorporates a newly designed seven-speaker system that delivers more than 80 watts of power and Dolby Atmos spatial sound. Other notable features of the UX include support for Dolby Vision, WiFi 6E and AMD Freesync Premium Pro. When the TV ships, it will also include a built-in ATSC 3.0 tuner for those who want to catch broadcast television. Hisense did not announce pricing and availability details for the UX. Expect those to arrive after CES.
Signify (formerly known as Philips Lighting) has a new app. It sounds kind of fun. You can use it to sync whatever's playing on certain Samsung TVs to Philips Hue smart lights, whether you're streaming a movie, listening to music or playing games. The idea is to make whatever you're watching feel more immersive by extending the colors to the rest of the room. Neat! Not so neat is how much Signify is charging for the Philips Hue Sync TV app. It costs £115, which works out to $138.
In fairness, that's still around $100 less expensive than the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, a device that connects to your TV and syncs your lights to whatever's playing. The app supports all image formats and you can customize the settings. You'll be able to tweak the lights' brightness and how intense the syncing is. You can choose to auto-start the experience and whether the lights should be in video or game mode. There's the option to pinpoint where lights are in relative to your TV too.
If you're somehow interested in paying $138 for the app instead of snapping up disco lights for, like, $12, you'll need a 2022 or newer QLED TV in the Q60 range or above. You'll find Philips Hue Sync TV on the Samsung TV app store starting on January 5th.
Signify
Elsewhere, Signify announced more Philips Hue devices. The Resonate downward wall light can brighten up outdoor spaces. It costs £110 ($132) and will be available on January 24th.
You may need to wait until March 14th for the latest Philips Hue Tap dial switch, which has a round mini mount that can be placed on magnetic surfaces, like a fridge. That will run you £45 ($54). Signify has also revealed when the Go portable table lamp it debuted last year will go on sale in the UK. You can snap it up for £140 ($169) on February 21st.
Put away the Little Trees air freshener, Panasonic has a more advanced solution the next time you want to make your car smell its best. At this year’s CES, the company showed off a portable air purifier that can fit in the cupholder of nearly any car, and filter out odors and even some pathogenic viruses and bacteria. The device uses Panasonic’s Nanoe X technology, which employs hydroxyl radicals, a diatomic molecule that’s known to act as a “detergent” when it comes into contact with pollutants, to clean the air. Panasonic says it takes about two hours for the device to freshen up the cabin of a car, and it does so while only producing about 36 decibels of sound. All you need to do is plug the Nanoe X Portable Air Purifier plugs into one of your car’s USB ports.
Panasonic is not the first company to announce a portable in-car purifier, but with the exception of Philips, it’s not exactly a market crowded by big brands. The company also went out of its way to certify the Nanoe X Purifer with the California Air Resource Board (CARB). Panasonic did not announce pricing and availability information for the device. Expect those to arrive at a later date.
CES is back! For real. Sort of. While the show has never actually gone away in spirit, this year is the first time since the pandemic that Engadget has a team on the ground. The show proper kicks off on Thursday Jan 5th, but the news has already been coming hot and heavy. If we count Jan 4th as Day 1, since it’s usually the media preview day, that would make today… Day 0. Some companies couldn’t even wait and broke their news on New Year’s day, those eager beavers. From Samsung’s eye-catching display prototypes and home appliances, to a slew of chips and laptops, here’s what you missed from Day 0 of CES 2023.
Samsung beat everyone to the punch by announcing some of its news early. On Monday, the company unveiled new QD-OLED TVs that will hit up to 2,000 nits of brightness, as well as a 57-inch 8K gaming display. But most intriguing are the new wall ovens that will livestream a video feed of what you’re cooking, plus a new prototype mobile display that can both slide and fold.
CES is also a big show for chip makers like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. This year, Intel unveiled its 13th-gen CPUs for laptops, which can offer up to 24 cores. NVIDIA had a slew of news, including the mid-range RTX 4070 Ti, which costs $800, as well as a series of RTX 4000 cards for laptops. The latter promises serious leaps in gaming performance for portable machines, with the flagship 4080 and 4090 GPUs reportedly being powerful enough to play games across three 4K monitors at 60 frames per second. NVIDIA is also expanding its GeForce Now game streaming to cars, while bringing the processing power of the RTX 4080 desktop GPU to the cloud gaming service.
These new chips are showing up in the usual plethora of laptops and computers from companies like Acer, Lenovo, Dell, ASUS, HP and more. Acer, for example, is updating its range of gaming laptops and simplifying its Swift series, with all of them getting 13th-generation Intel Core processors, alongside design refinements. Meanwhile, LG is updating its Gram series of super thin and light laptops with — you guessed it — 13th-generation Intel Raptor Lake processors. The new Gram Style is a mere 10.99mm or 0.43 inches thin, and has a so-called “hidden” trackpad that has LED backlighting that illuminates when you touch it.
Dell usually shows off some compelling concepts at CES and this year it’s catching our attention with an update to Concept Nyx. As a refresher, Concept Nyx is the company’s vision for a server for your home that can let you play games on various screens around the house. The update this year is a new accessory, and senior reporter Devindra Hardawar, who has already checked it out, called it a “truly baffling PC gamepad.” He even says “it’s like the Steam Controller 2.0, but worse.” Check out his hands-on to see why, and stay tuned all week as we bring you all the news from CES 2023.
Disney+ is bolstering its IMAX Enhanced films, including some Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, with another audio option. The streaming service will enable IMAX signature sound by DTS on select titles this year, offering viewers high-fidelity audio to go with the expanded aspect ratio.
You'll need compatible equipment to hear DTS audio, however. At the outset, some IMAX Enhanced-certified TVs from manufacturers such as Sony and Hisense will support DTS on Disney+, as will certain AV receivers from the likes of Denon, Marantz and JBL. However, you don't need any particular devices to view IMAX’s expanded aspect ratio of 1.90:1, which offers up to 26 percent taller pictures during certain sequences.
Some may find that the addition of DTS audio will help them to better replicate the IMAX experience at home. DTS will provide a higher bitrate alternative to Dolby Atmos, but many folks prefer the latter. In the near future, you may be able to watch a Disney+ movie in either audio format and decide for yourself.
Meanwhile, Disney+ has announced when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming to the platform. You'll be able to stream the most recent MCU movie at home starting on February 1st. The film will have IMAX Enhanced support.
Four years after debuting at CES 2019, Holoride’s in-car VR technology is finally poised to go mainstream. Starting today, the startup has begun selling Retrofit, an all-in-one system you can install in your car to access Holoride content, in the US and Germany. The company designed Retrofit to work with vehicles of any make, model or year.
The device is about the size of a smart speaker and weighs less than half a pound. Installing Retrofit involves attaching it to the windshield of your car with the included mounting arm, which features a suction cup for easy installation. Retrofit’s built-in battery can power the device for up to 14 hours on one charge, and you can use the included USB-C to USB-A cable to charge the device inside your car. You can connect Retrofit to up to two Holoride-compatible VR headsets via Bluetooth.
Inside, the puck features all the technology needed to enable Holoride’s signature “Elastic Content.” When you play an interactive video or game, the platform adapts the experience to the car’s movement. So say you’re playing a game that involves a spacecraft. When the vehicle accelerates, so too will the spaceship. In that way, not only is the experience more immersive, but it’s also likely to cause you to experience motion sickness. Retrofit can collect and process all the movement and location data needed to enable those experiences.
Of course, adding that sort of functionality to your car won’t come cheap. By itself, Retrofit costs $199. However, most people will probably need to shell out for the $799 Retrofit Pack to get an HTC Vive Flow headset and 8BitDo Pro2 controller with their purchase. That’s a lot of money to pay for a backseat experience, and likely as good of a test as any whether there’s a market for Holoride’s technology.
LG unwrapped its 2023 soundbars right after Christmas, but the company is showing the duo off here at CES. The SC9 and SE6 are both equipped with Dolby Atmos, but while the former is a more premium-level device, the SE6 is compact all-in-one unit more akin to Sonos' Beam. We got out first look at both at CES along with some more info on each unit.
First, the SC9 is designed to work best with LG's OLED TVs — specifically the C series. The company has even designed a custom mounting bracket for its TVs so that the soundbar is attached to the display and not the wall. This means that if your television is on a swivel bracket itself, the speaker rotates with it pointing the sound in the same direction as the TV. And speaking of directional audio, LG has equipped the SC9 with three upfiring speakers — one more than a lot of soundbars offer. That should boost the speaker's Dolby Atmos and DTS:X capabilities.
A few features for the SC9 are exclusive to LG TVs. Wow Orchestra syncs the display's speakers with the soundbar for the best audio experience and Wow Interface puts all of the SC9's sound settings on the TV for easy access. The company's Wowcast technology will let you connect to its TVs over Wifi, allowing you to ditch the wired connection if you see fit. In terms of wired connectivity, there are two HDMI ports: an HDMI/ARC for linking with the TV and one additional jack.
The LG SE6 is another proposition entirely. This compact unit still offers Dolby Atmos in a frame that's cloth wrapped and has softer, rounded edges. As you might expect, LG built the SE6 for people who have smaller spaces or simply want a smaller soundbar in front of their TV. It still offers HDMI/ARC connectivity with your TV with one additional HDMI port alongside. To further reduce any clutter, the SE6 doesn't come with a subwoofer like the SC9 does. However, it does support Wow Orchestra, Wowcast and most of the new features the company added to the more robust SC9.
LG hasn't announced pricing and availability yet, but we're likely to get that info sometime this spring.
Though popular with videographers, Panasonic's mirrorless cameras have always been at a disadvantage to Sony, Canon and other rivals due to the inferior contrast-detect-only autofocus. Now, the company has finally introduced its first cameras with hybrid phase-detect AF (PDAF), the full-frame L-Mount S5II and S5IIx. They're designed to make focus "wobble" and other issues a thing of the past, while also introducing improved video and photography features.
Both cameras have an all-new 24.2-megapixel sensor with 315 contrast and 779 phase-detect AF points. The new chip features Dual Native ISO with a range of ISO100-51200 (50-204800 expanded), and Panasonic has also introduced the new L2 Engine that processes twice as fast as before. That allows for additional performance and less rolling shutter distortion.
I've yet to test the cameras, but Panasonic seems confident that its new PDAF system can keep up with rivals, speed- and reliability-wise. It said that the AF can now works in conditions that had previously been a challenge, including tracking, multiple people, products, backlit conditions and low light.
Panasonic
The company also introduced a new in-body stabilization system called Active IS, designed to shoot video while walking. It said the system can compensate for "even significant camera shake, approximately 200 percent more than conventional systems" with select lenses. If the claims are accurate, Active IS could make the new models ideal for vlogging.
As before, they can record 6K "open gate" 3:2 video (4:2:0 10-bit internally), 4K 30p supersampled video using the full sensor width (4:2:2 10-bit), 4K 60p with an APS-C crop and FHD at up to 120p with a 1.5x crop.
However, they're significantly improved over the original S5 when it comes to record times. Where the S5 was limited to 30 minutes at 4K 60p or 4K 10-bit 30p due to heating, the new models have no recording time limitations at any resolution. Panasonic achieved this by adding a small cooling fan in the enlarged EVF hump.
Panasonic didn't improve the S5's 200 Mbps data rates for the internal MOV and LongGOP formats on the S5II and S5IIx. However, the S5IIx does support internal SD card recording up to 600 Mbps in All-Intra (All-I) mode, so it appears to be limiting the capabilities of the S5II.
Panasonic
Both cameras offer Panasonic's V-Log as well as V-Gamut recording options that deliver up to 14+ stops of dynamic range, according to the company. It has a LUT view assist for easier monitoring, as well as the ability to apply your own LUTs in real time — an industry first, Panasonic says.
Other than the fully blacked-out body, the S5IIx has some interesting features not found on the S5II. You can record to the USB-C port, much as you can on the GH6 via a recent firmware update. Formats supported include All-I, ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 422, all in 10-bit. That includes 5.8K (17:9) at up to 25p (1.6Gbps) and C4K (4,096 x 2,160) at 60p with an APS-C crop (1.9Gbps). That will require some kind of rig to mount a USB SSD, but those already exist and aren't tremendously expensive.
In addition, the S5IIx will output full-frame 12-bit 5.9K 30p (16:9) ProRes RAW video, along with cropped 12-bit 4K (actually 4,128 x 2,176) and 3.5K (3,536 x 2,656) video at up to 50p externally to an Atomos Ninja V+ HDR monitor-recorder. Both cameras also offer S&Q and HFR recording, letting you capture at high frame rates and either output at the same speed for HFR or get slow-mo in the S&Q modes.
There are a number of other improvements over the S5. The EVF resolution has been boosted to 3,680K dots compared to 2,360K on the last model, removing one of my biggest complaints. It now offers a full-sized HDMI rather than a fragile microHDMI port plus a USB 3.2 Gen2 (not Gen1) slot, and has two UHS-II SD slots instead of just one. The EVF's eye-detect sensor has been moved up to reduce accidental activations, and the joystick now supports 8- instead of 4-direction operation.
Panasonic
Otherwise, it has much the same layout as the last model (including the fully-articulating display) and is about the same size and weight. It supports 4-channel audio via the same XLR microphone adapter, offers a variety video assist functions (wave form, vector scope, zebra, anti-flicker), Lumix Tether for remote USB shooting and wireless streaming via USB tethering (S5IIx only).
Finally, photography clearly isn't this camera's raison d'etre, but it does offer 7fps RAW shooting speeds in mechanical mode and 30fps in electronic mode with AFC enabled — up over four times compared to the previous model. And with the phase-detect AF, focus should be more accurate when shooting bursts, meaning fewer blurry photos.
That takes us to the most interesting part of these cameras, the pricing. The Panasonic S5II is going on sale this month $2,000, making it cheaper than rival full-frame models like the Sony A7 IV and Canon EOS R6 II — and it's no longer deficient in the autofocus department. While the S5II doesn't come with external RAW video, you'll be able to update to that feature in the future via a $200 firmware update. Panasonic also upped its native lens count to 14 with the launch of the Lumix S 14-28mm F4-5.6 Macro lens arriving in March for $800.
Meanwhile, the S5IIx will arrive in May 2023 for $2,200. It not only has has the RAW video, but also supports USB-C capture and live streaming, features the S5II will never have — for just $200 more. Panasonic says that's because the former is designed for vloggers and the latter for video pros. Frankly though, if I was a vlogger and interested in the S5II, I'd try to find the extra $200.
Last CES, Goodyear dazzled the assembled crowds with a protype tire that derived some 70 percent of its recipe from sustainable sources. This CES, Goodyear is back with an impressive iterative improvement — 90 percent sustainable materials will go into this one! A full 20 percent more sustainment, huzzah!
Goodyear reports that the 90-percent blend has already undergone — and passed — DoT testing, making it approved for road use. The company is still working with its supply chain partners to secure sufficient precursor materials to produce them at commercial scale and hopes to devise a fully sustainable blend by 2030.
In addition to their diminished carbon footprint, the 90 percent tires reportedly offer a lower rolling resistance than the company's test reference tires, which translates into better gas mileage and longer EV ranges. The new materials include four different types of carbon black produced from both organic and inorganic sources, soybean oil and rice husk silica, post-consumer polyester and bio-renewable pine tar resins.
"Last January, we announced a 70% sustainable-material tire, and while we celebrated this accomplishment, we knew it set the foundation for us to continue to push forward,” said Chris Helsel, senior vice president, global operations and chief technology officer. “Over the past year, we researched new technologies, identified opportunities for further collaboration and utilized our team’s ingenuity and tenacity to achieve this tremendous accomplishment, increasing the sustainable-material content used in a tire by 20 percentage points."
Thanks to a partnership with Gatik, the Goodyear tires of tomorrow will be a bit intelligent as well. The tiremaker announced its coordination with the B2B logistics company to develop a proof-of-concept technology, dubbed SightLine, that "can accurately estimate tire-road friction potential and provide real-time information to Gatik’s automated driving system (ADS)," according to a company release Wednesday.
The two companies recently, successfully trialed the grip-sensing system in Toronto. Data from the tire sensors is combined with that from other vehicle systems — such as tire wear state, load, inflation pressure and temperature — and fed into "Goodyear's cloud-based proprietary algorithms" where they jiggle and cajole the information into friction estimates that help the onboard systems detect "low grip" conditions. Those estimates can then be shared with the rest of the local Gatik autonomous vehicle fleet. Whether this technology, either the sensing system or sustainable tires, moves forward remains to be seen.
For an event that was once the venue where Samsung announced its latest Galaxy S phones, CES isn’t much of a mobile show these days. But you do still see the occasional phone unveiling, including the newly announced Samsung Galaxy A14 5G. It’s a more affordable version of last year’s Galaxy A13 5G that features a new 13-megapixel front-facing camera the company claims offers a “huge leap in selfie quality.”
New camera aside, the A14 5G is more or less the same phone Samsung shipped last year. It features a slightly larger 6.6-inch screen that boasts a 90Hz refresh rate and FHD+ resolution. As with its predecessor, the A14 comes with a MediaTek Dimensity 700 chipset. At over two years old, it’s a chip that’s starting to show its age, but with an integrated sub-6GHz 5G modem built-in, the Dimensity 700 should make efficient use of the A14’s 5,000mAh battery and offer about two days of uptime. For photos and videos, Samsung has once again gone with a triple camera array that consists of a 50MP main camera and two 2MP macro and depth cameras.
In the US, Samsung will offer a single variant of the A14 5G equipped with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. A microSD card slot allows you to add up to 1TB of additional space for apps, media and more. The Galaxy A14 5G will ship with Android 13 out of the box. Samsung says you can expect up to two major Android updates and four years of security support if you buy its latest phone. While it’s a boring update to the A13 5G, the Galaxy A14 5G should still find fans since Samsung plans to sell the phone for $200, or $50 less than it did its predecessor. That should allow the A14 5G to better compete against devices like the $240 Nord N200 5G.
